Quest with the Best, Don't Die Like the Rest (Mount Doom Cam

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navarrenightblade 23

This is the deck I used to beat Mount Doom in a two-player campaign. It was partnered with Nerdanelthered's One DOES Simply Walk into Mordor deck. This is certainly not a surefire way to beat the quest, but I hope it can provide some inspiration for people who are stuck on the quest.

Boons

Sam Gamgee had Noble Hero and Esquire of Rohan; Arwen had Leader of Men.

Deck Design

The quest has several challenging aspects.

  • You need to do a lot of questing fairly quickly, as there is a time limit. There is not a lot of time to turtle.
  • The quest punishes you for having allies.
  • You also have to make Fortitude tests, which involve having high willpower.

To approach the quest, I decided to build a deck which aims to build willpower on the heroes. Sam Gamgee, Éowyn, and Arwen Undómiel all have good willpower to begin with. The thought was to boost their willpower with cards like Fireside Song (and Song of Travel), Celebrían's Stone, Windfola, and The Favor of the Lady. Fellowship of the Ring is also huge for willpower boosting. The partner deck runs Friend of Friends, which goes on Sam and Frodo (or potentially Sam and Rosie Cotton). With these cards I was able to get my heroes questing respectable amounts by themselves.

To both quest and pass Fortitude tests, the heroes need readying. Light of Valinor is great on Arwen, as she can almost always quest and then test. Snowmane can ready Eowyn after questing successfully, for some of those key fortitude tests that happen post-questing. Steed of the Mark is not an ideal card but can do something similar (and can also be played across the table to any of the partner heroes). The partner deck runs 3 copies of Fast Hitch, which is important for readying Sam.

The deck runs light on allies, but I've included Rosie Cotton and Glorfindel as potential candidates for Sword-thain. If you can make one of these a hero, they will benefit from Fellowship of the Ring and can contribute pretty decent willpower in their own right. I've put in a few other cards for various purposes: Elven-light is card draw, Orc Disguise and O Elbereth! Gilthonial! help to address enemies, and Thrór's Key can help to deal with some of the nastier location effects (Brake of Thorns, I'm looking at you!)

The ideal setup is for you to have your heroes all with 5-6 willpower (more is possible on Sam with Fireside Song, Friend of Friends, Song of Travel, and Fellowship of the Ring). You also want to have Fast Hitch on Sam, Light of Valinor on Arwen, and Snowmane on Eowyn. Now you can quest with all of them and still do pretty well on Fortitude tests. If things are going really well, you might have Sword-thain Rosie Cotton with Fast Hitch as well.

Once you have this, keep questing and testing hard. Our goal was to blitz through Stage 1 on Turn 1, finish Stage 2 on Turn 2, take Turns 3 and 4 finishing Stage 3, and then finally explore Mount Doom and make the final test on Turn 5.

One weakness of the deck is obviously combat. If you get a ton of enemies engaged with you there really isn't much you can do to defend them, let alone kill them. Fortunately, if you move fast enough and get a little luck, you don't have to kill the enemies. The other deck runs The Wizards's Voice to cancel attacks, and with Rosie Cotton out Sam can do some defending in a pinch. Arwen is also often ready to defend attacks from Gollum and Little Snuffler. The hope is that you can avoid enough enemies and make enough defenses to get you to the Crack of Doom.

Opening Hand

I pretty much mulliganed hard for Fellowship of the Ring. That card gives such a big global willpower boost that I think it's worth keeping even if you don't have other great cards. You can get by without it, but it becomes much more of a struggle to hit the schedule.

Other good things to see are your readying cards like Light of Valinor. Elven-light is also good because it can draw you more cards. But I'm not sure I would keep a hand with those cards that didn't include Fellowship of the Ring.

Final Thoughts

I don't think this is the best version of this deck, and I'd be very interested to hear how other players might improve it. However, with the quest finally beaten, I don't think I'll be playing Mount Doom again for a while!

A few thoughts I've been pondering:

  • A Test of Will may not be worth it when, for much of the game, the first treachery revealed can't be canceled.
  • I'm not sure about Steed of Imladris either, as often I had other things to play.
  • Power in the Earth is a card I almost never play. I threw it in here because I wanted ways to improve questing without getting more allies. Is it worth it? It never came out in the game we won, so I'm not sure.
  • Power of Orthanc might be worth it to remove Heavy and Tired. In the game we won, Heavy and Tired did come out. Fortunately we were able to put it on Frodo Baggins, as having it on one of the other heroes could have been disastrous.
2 comments

Oct 15, 2018 tomtom 26

I suppose you could ditch Power in the Earth in favor of Lay of Nimrodel. Fellowship-wise Protector of Lorien should be better than Dunedain Quest.

Oct 15, 2018 navarrenightblade 23

I actually ran Lay of Nimrodel in an earlier version of the deck, but I found I often didn't have that many resources built up to make it worthwhile. The partner deck was also running Protector, but we found similarly that we didn't have that many cards to discard. I think both cards are cool and I have always wanted them to work--they just didn't do it for me in this case.